Menticulture Blog

Butterfly

Let us attribute to our dreams, before reading, in a garden, the attention demanded by some white butterfly, this one that is everywhere at once, nowhere, it vanishes; but not before an acute and ingenious trifle, to which I reduce the subject, had, a moment ago, passed and repassed, insistently, before my astonished eyes.

The world of revelation: things becoming present, the objects of attention, the visible surfaces. Far from being muffled, or doomed, or spent - worthless - the traces of the world to which we have access are dancing, butterfly-like, fleeting: astonishing. At once everywhere and nowhere, present-at-hand, and ready-to-hand - torn. The readiness is everywhere, the presence, nowhere. The image - insistent, acute, ingenious; the executant - dreaming, garden-grounded.

Despite this, the flashing, dancing life of the present, the image, the surface effects eternally divorced from their subterranean being - these are also passing, once - twice - repeating, but always passing, into trifles, disappearing, forgotten. There is no shame or tragedy in the constant fleeing and forgetting of the glittering, minded surfaces of things, despite the attendant, comforting melancholia of all those endings. Mourn, but also celebrate, the brevity of the vanishing flashes of presence.

Making ghosts

Ortega holds that the inwardness of things is a depth that can absolutely never be fathomed, insofar as it is not interchangeable with any sum of its attributes ... The growth of knowledge is a process of digging away at this inwardness of things and attempting the ultimately hopeless task of bringing it to light. "This," says Ortega, "is the task of language, but language merely alludes to inwardness - it never shows it." In more melancholic terms, "a narrative makes everything a ghost of itself, placing it a distance, pushing it beyond the horizon of the here and now." The fate of language, as of perception and ... of all relation, is forever to translate the dark and inward into the tangible and outward, a task at which it always comes up short given the infinite depth of things.

Hopeless, melancholic, ghost. As Romanyshyn's mourning wells within the gap between saying and being, so Harman's lonely doom for the split object, sundered between the sensuous and the real - what is revealed and what always withdraws.

I like Ortega y Gasset's distinction between executant and image - the former grasping towards the fullness of being, the latter faltering short of adequacy. I'm reminded of Arnold's verdict on Shelley - "a beautiful but ineffectual angel". I especially enjoy the irony of the connection of execution to being - how close the ending of life is to the presence of life; how narrow is that gap. Are there no fleeting moments when it closes? When the inward representation of experience and the uncompromising nowness of being fuse? Harman says:

To observe something, no matter how closely, is not to be it; to look at a thing is not the same thing as to stand in its place and undergo its fate, even if what we are observing is our own psychic lives.

... so there is no closing the gap here. But still I wonder if there might be? Transcendental meditation? Praxis? Being 'in the moment'? Laughter? Thoughtlessness when lost in smiling eyes? Dialogue? In the sincerity of experience?